Configuration discovery and monitoring middleware for enterprise datacenters

Automatic discovery and monitoring of IT resources is a critical part of enterprise systems management. In addition to ascertaining internal device configurations, this discovery process may also need to capture the capabilities, usage, connectivity, availability, and other information related to various IT components. Systems resource management (SRM) tools typically implement this discovery process using device specific APIs, custom agents and/or some standard-based solution (like WBEM and CIM). The discovery actions need to be systematically planned; an inefficient implementation or scheduling may easily take from a few minutes to several hours to complete in a large heterogeneous enterprise datacenter. This paper discusses the various challenges associated in discovering the configuration of a datacenter environment and presents an autonomic configuration monitoring middleware called Magellan that builds upon industry best practices and standards. Magellan reduces the overall discovery time by more than 50% in our micro-benchmark experiments as well as in a large datacenter configuration of a major financial organization.